[Edited August 8, 2022, to provide the tab list and location guide for the Bluebook, as well as brief instructions about it below.]

If you are a lawyer or law student writing legal documents typical in practice (memos, briefs to courts, etc.), the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation is a superior tool for finding and correctly using citation rules. (The 7th edition, it seems to me, does an even better job than the 6th of producing citations that are indistinguishable from those you’d produce using the Bluebook, but more on that below.)

But for the ALWD Guide to achieve its full utility, you should adopt a system of tabbing it to make content more accessible. Over the last several years, I’ve developed such a system to use for my teaching and the occasional consulting work I do as of-counsel for my old law firm. Students say that they have found it useful for locating answers in the guide quickly. This video provides detailed instructions for how to do that.

But you also need access to two documents to which the video refers and that you can download here:  Tab Location Guide21 and Tab list21. Note that the list of tabs includes some tabs in the optional second highlight color referred to in the video. You can use a single highlight color for all highlight tabs, or you can use two, which I find slightly easier for my own practice.

I owe a debt of gratitude to a law student who helped me see the potential of tabs in a variety of places on the page, running some tabs up and others down the page, and having back-facing tabs. Unfortunately, I cannot now find the blog she posted with these ideas to give her credit. If that’s you, pipe up in the comments.

One last point: I teach my students both the ALWD Guide and the Bluebook in their first year—ALWD Guide in fall as they are learning basic citations, and Bluebook in spring as they get ready for law-review write on. I also use the Bluebook extensively for legal scholarship, because it is a much better finding tool for that kind of writing. Always use the right tool for the right job!

I tab my Bluebook using a very similar technique to the one in this video. But I probably will not make a video for tabbing the Bluebook, as the method is the same as that shown here. It just requires a different tabs list and tab location guide: I hope to post them on this blog before the end of 2021 for those who want them.

Update August 8, 2022: The Bluebook list of tabs and tab-location guide are now available here. If you wish to tab your Bluebook, download these guides, watch the video above for the ALWD Guide, and then use the same method to tab your Bluebook.

Questions? Please leave a comment.

-Brian